So, sorry about the absence.  I was at the seaside.  No, really, I was. I’ll post a picture some time to prove it – you can see me wincing as the refreshing North Sea waves wash over my toes.

Did you celebrate National Poetry Day?  I did, quietly, by doing some work on a poem in the University Refectory in full view of students and staff – and not hiding it under pages of other stuff, as I usually do.  And I read Don Paterson’s Rain, which a kind relative had sent me as a belated birthday present, and which, by the time I got home, had won the Forward Prize.  And there seemed to be lots of pronouncements about the state of poetry in the media.  All the ones I heard were positive.

Twenty years ago, Agenda published an issue devoted to this very subject.  I found a copy of it (Volume 27 Number 3, if you want to track it down) at a  second-hand bookshop.  The editors sent various poets a letter, asking for up to 500 words on “…the current state and role of poetry in the UK and Ireland” and a sheet of quotations on the subject.  Here are some of the responses which have caught my eye so far:

George Barker:  … I have only one remark which is that I have been seeking far and wide for this fabulous mastodon and in several years only glimpsed it once and I think it was called a Tony Harrison.

Carol Rumens:  Poetry is close-looking….But a poet is not simply a camera or a microscope.  I think there is still too much ‘camera’ poetry being written in Britain (and, in the USA, perhaps not enough!)

Ted Hughes: “Every man skin his own skunk” (Sioux Proverb)

Ruth Silcock: … Poets used to be called makers and also prophets.  Seeing the homeless in cardboard boxes, watching the news on television, looking up at recent sunny skies, there seems to be a need for poets in the second of these two roles.

Iain Crichton Smith: … It seems to me that over the past number of years poetry has been progressively marginalised. …

Elizabeth Jennings: … So much which arrives in one’s post and is seen in books and pamphlets is not poetry at all; it shows no craftsmanship and is written in what can only be called arbitrarily chopped-up prose. …

Interesting to think about; how many of these opinions are still held today?  All of them?  One or two?

I think I’m with Ted Hughes.

Das ist nett von den Briten, daß sie meinen Hochzeitstag und den Geburtstag des Hamburger Dichters Wilhelm Fink, den 8.10., zu ihrem Nationalen Lyriktag gemacht haben.

Der Tag wird im ganzen Land mit einer Vielzahl Veranstaltungen begangen, vom Nachmittagstee mit Wendy Cope in Wyeside, “zufälligen Akten poetischer Freundlichkeit” der Dichterin Sally Crabtree in Truro und einem Jazz Poetry Superjam in London.
Das weltgrößte gestrickte Gedicht, von über 1000 Helfern geschaffen, die jeweils einzelne Buchstaben strickten, wurde vor der British Library entrollt. Es mißt 13 x 8,7 m und besteht aus über 1200 Vierecken, die das Gedicht “In My Craft or Sullen Art” von Dylan Thomas bilden. Ausgedacht hat sich das die Direktorin der Poetry Society, Judith Palmer.
Poet laureate Duffy hat zum Anlaß ein Gedicht geschrieben zum Thema Helden und Heldinnen. Es geht um Atlas,

“crouched on one knee in the dark / with the Earth on his back … and rivers, he holds the rivers, / holds the Amazon, Ganges, Nile, hero, hero, … Give him strength, strong girth, for elephants, / tigers, snow leopards, polar bears, bees, bats, / the last ounce of a humming-bird.”

Zugleich teilte sie mit, daß sie Gründungspatronin eines neuen Lyrikfestivals in Shropshire im kommenden April sein wird. “Lyrikfestivals sind das Herzblut der Lyrik im Vereinigten Königreich – die zauberhaften, denkwürdigen Gelegenheiten, bei denen Jung und Alt die lebendigen Stimmen der Dichter hören kann”, sagte Duffy. “Und Much Wenlock ist der perfekte Ort für ein Lyrikfestival; eine freundliche Stadt mitten in Housman-Land, mit herrlichen Kneipen, phantastischen Spazierwegen, guten Unterkünften und einer wunderbaren unabhängigen Buchhandlung.” Die Veranstalterin, die Buchhändlerin Anna Dreda, sagte, in der Gegend gebe es einen gewaltigen Appetit auf Lyrik.
Am Vortag wurden auch die Gewinner des Forward Prize bekanntgegeben. Der schottische Dichter Don Paterson gewann den mit £10,000 dotierten Preis für den besten Gedichtband für “Rain”, Robin Robertson erhielt den Preis für das beste Einzelgedicht und “The Striped World” der australischen Lyrikerin Emma Jones wurde als bester Debütband ausgezeichnet. / Guardian 8.10.

Okay – I finally got my copy of the Forward Prize anthology – only a week after it was posted in Cambridge! Thank you Post Office, I really am grateful.

Sharp-eyed and otherwise well-informed readers will know that the reason I’ve been sent one is that, hurrah! Me and the Dead was clearly long-listed for the Forward, and they have chosen the poem “To My Next Lover” to be in the Highly Commended section of the book.

Looking at the company in that section is all the consolation one could ever need for not being shortlisted. I haven’t had a chance to read even half of it yet, but what I have read was often remarkable. Mimi Khalvati’s long elegy for EA Markham is just tremendous.

There are poems from seven Salt collections in the Highly Commended section – as well as Sîan Hughes in the shortlist for Best First Collection (but I won’t worry about that; the Schadenfreude element is that it is actually called  the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection, and who wants that). (Good of him to put up the money, of course.) So it’s great news for Salt! And of those seven, five are books I’ve read and thought were great. I won’t pick them out. It’s a really strong list.

In fact, the news seems to be that there are lots of poems in the book from lots of small presses and tiny magazines. I do think the small and indie presses are the current big news in UK poetry and it is exciting to see how much great work they’re publishing. There’s a poem from the tiny yet compelling Egg Box Publishing. There are books from CB Editions, Arrowhead, Cinnamon Press, Penned in the Margins, Tall Lighthouse. There are I think three poems from Brittle Star magazine, and one from The Wolf… It’s great to see them all making a splash.

Here’s the book: it’ll be out on October 8, National Poetry Day.

And that’s not even counting who’s going to win! We’re not really talking about that.

Today is National Poetry Day, and it’s being marked in a number of different ways. The Forward Prizes for poetry were announced, and the best collection one went to Mick Imlah’s The Lost Leader (as I predicted here). Best first collection went to Kathryn Simmonds’ Sunday in the Skin Launderette, which I’ve read and enjoyed. Best single poem was judged to be by Don Paterson. It’s been said already that the selection reflects the conservative tastes of the judging panel, and that may be true, but I can’t honestly disagree with their choices this time. I favoured Simon Barraclough’s collection Los Alamos Mon Amour as best first collection, and Tim Turnbull’s poem as best single poem. However, all of the short-listed collections and poems were well worth reading this time, so to my mind it was a good field.

Also announced today is the McCash Award – See Lesley Duncan’s Herald blog. Rab Wilson won it this time – a fine, energetic and likeable poet.

The Scottish Poetry Library has produced the Poetry Cards again this year, and I’m looking forward to picking up a set next time I’m in. (I’ll be there to retrieve my bunnet, another of my serially misplaced objects, only this time I did remember where I’d left it.)

Elspeth Murray was one of the poets featured on a Radio 4 programme this morning, along with Tom Chivers and others. The programme concerned itself with this year’s NPD theme of ‘Work’, and the poets were all in residencies in the workplace.

My own ‘Working Mothers’ poem should be out in an anthology soon, and I’ll post the details later.

Roddy Lumsden has listed the Forward Prize shortlists on the Poets On Fire forum, so I won’t repeat it here, but it’s an interesting list. Some years it’s fairly predictable, but I’m pleased to see this time several entries which I think are original and interesting.

In the Main Prize category I’m not going to take bets on the winner, but I’m delighted that Jen Hadfield’s Nigh-No-Place is in there. There are a couple I’m not familiar with, so I’ll see if the Scottish Poetry Library has them in stock.

For First Book I’m not surprised to see Frances Leviston’s Public Dream is there – I think it’s an excellent debut. My old friend Andrew Forster’s Fear of Thunder is also there, and it’s a bit embarrassing to say that I haven’t yet read this collection – another ‘must read’ one for me.

I enjoyed reading Don Paterson’s Love Poem for Natalie ‘Tusja’ Beridze, one of the entries in the Single Poem category, but Tim Turnbull’s Ode on a Grayson Perry Urn gets my vote for the most outrageous title.

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Spent this afternoon selecting poems for an October Calder Wood Press title – very exciting.

Hello readers,

This seems a formal way of addressing an audience that doesn’t exist but it seems better than starting Hello me. I’m still unsure how this blog is going to work and this is just post number one. The strongest idea I have at the moment is that I’m going to post some of my writing – mainly poetry but perhaps some shorter fiction (all after a lot of thought, I don’t want you to read first, second or third drafts) – and as such some of it will change as I return to it. Which could be exciting or annoying depending on your viewpoint. Let me know, I guess. But better get it out than keep it in, as a weird teacher at my school used to say. I will also be linking somewhere else with every post, so even if you don’t like what I offer I hope you’ll get something new and interesting from a paid professional. These links will always be found underneath my posts.

Hidden

You taught me what I knew
That always we remain
In spite of love or money
Fear of loss and family
Hidden in a game
With one eye poking through
The curtains, between
The window and the door
Childishly uncertain
Of never being caught.

And here’s the link – Fantasia on a Theme of James Wright, by Sean O’Brien

He’s just won the Forward prize for poetry for a record third time, and this is from that latest collection The Drowned Book. I think this poem won best prize for something some time ago as well. I haven’t read the book but this deserves special attention.

Thanks for reading.

I finished my review. It has ended up being better and worse than I expected. For one thing, it’s too short at eighteen panels – but my cheap scanner and even cheaper paper have pulled the job off surprisingly well. It’s clear, there’s only slight blurring on one of the images, the text is legible. The strange woman featured was supposed to be me, but she ended up being better looking with thicker hair. Next time I won’t go for realism – I might use the Dog Woman or Orlando or something. It’ll be up on Culture Wars next week.

I haven’t been able to find any other graphic reviews. I don’t think it’s a viable way to assess a book for two reasons: there is the issue of space. A 500 word article might be two or three inches. An eighteen to twenty panel comic strip will take the best of two pages in a tabloid. Second, it takes forever. I spent three whole days drawing and inking the thing. One thing I learned when I worked at Spiked is that you have to work fast; you have to write about something the DAY it happens, or else you predict it. There’s no time for proper reflection; no time to sit and consider which image is a suitable juxtaposition to the line about the spacetime continuum. It does, however, seem like an awesome way to present a pamphlet: graphic slim volume, anyone?

I re-discovered these guys on YouTube. When we went up to Manchester J and I were puzzled about why football went on and on and on with no respite. Y had to explain that there were leagues and premierships and cups and so on. The following is a great parody:

Also – GodTube. Yes, GodTube. And Chase Harper is the poster boy.

I was up at half past four this morning to get to Shooter’s Hill. There they hold a car boot sale and I’ve never seen such a depressing array of people in my life. I was selling books – good ones. I had Kazuo Ishiguro and Mark Haddon, Orwell and Albom. I was selling them for £1.00, though I was willing to accept 50p in some cases. A woman said she liked Steven King and I recommended ‘Bag of Bones’ for the princely sum of 70p. Her face dropped. Whilst I understood that it was a car boot sale, and it was early in the morning and we were all in a particularly grim corner of Greenwich (about five minutes from where Stephen Lawrence was murdered) – I couldn’t understand the pessimism, the desperation and the petty haggling that was going on. This is a first world country! A couple squabbled over ten pence. I said thirty, they said twenty. I won, hooray for me, but they got away with a pretty good bit of glass that I could have sold elsewhere, in conditions less apt for suicide.

Jackie Kay tonight @ La Danza. If ever there was an example of a performance poet it’s her; she reads so well; she has gravity and presence without being sombre or facetious; her accent is novel; she tells sweet stories about her parents; her set must have been something like an hour long and it didn’t feel like it. During the interval I got speaking to some of Helen’s friends and one asked whether I was a performance poet. I am beginning to reject the title. Reading is as much a performance as having a prop stashed backstage to whip out sentimentally, or metaphorically or ironically. It’s as much a performance as shouting in to the microphone or running around. My point: being on stage is necessarily a performance and Jackie Kay – who is straightforward and curious enough to look at it – does it well.

There was dancing afterwards. I left. On the train home I finished reading ‘Gift Songs’ by John Burnside. It’s been nominated for the Forward Prize and I was asked to do a little review for Culture Wars. I might never have picked it up, but I’m glad it was suggested as it’s a beautiful book. The blurb reads: ‘In his tenth collection, John Burnside begins with an interrogation of the gift song, treating matters of faith and connection, the community of living creatures and the idea of the free church – where faith is placed, not in dogma or a possible credo, but in the indefinable.’ To exemplify:

‘Nobody sees the angel face to face,

it’s mostly induction, a reading of clues and signs

as, after the fact, he remembers the sea as it was

On a specified morning, two or three seasons ago:’

 - Le Croisic, I : Sacred

 I have been thinking about fiction, literature, the inner life and how making things up is actually mad and ritualistic. I don’t profess any faith when I fill in forms or when I shout at the TV and side with whatever beleaguered atheist is called upon to speak – but I am growing partial to this idea of, not worshipping, but trying to understand (really understand) all the stuff we make up. What for? To paraphrase EM Forster, we’re creatures who spend two thirds of our time in the dark. To flatly state that you only believe in what’s physical (which I have been doing for some time now) is a mistake and the fact of our dreaming should make that apparent.